Johnson not yet ready to end hoops career

Guard Ben McLemore, left, and Elijah Johnson, right, have fun near the end of Kansas' open practice Thursday at Cowboys Stadium, sight of Friday's games in the NCAA South Regional.

ARLINGTON, Texas — Marcus Johnson raised his son to fulfill a calculated future.

It started, Marcus recalls, when Elijah hit his first game-winning shot and a group of exceptionally strong second graders carried him off the court.

When he got older, Elijah would fly from Gary, Ind., to Houston to train with his uncle, a former major league baseball player. Later, when Elijah was going into the seventh grade, he moved with his father to Las Vegas, where a budding basketball star can meet people with money and connections.

All of this was done, Marcus said, with specific end points in mind.

“The plans that we had in life, the two main things that we had set forward,” Marcus said, “were him playing in the McDonald’s All-American game and him getting to the NBA.”

In between, Elijah has spent the past four years wearing a Kansas uniform. Thursday, on the eve of what could be his final game as a college player, Johnson was asked to put everything in perspective.

“I don’t sum it up yet,” he said. “It’s not over. I don’t sum it up until it’s done.”

Johnson’s senior season provides a strong argument against premature conclusions. At one point, when Johnson was mired in a shooting slump and struggling with turnovers, many KU fans had identified point guard play as this team’s fatal flaw. Then Johnson erupted for 39 points in a miraculous comeback at Iowa State, and people started to view him in a different light.

Johnson’s numbers have dipped again since then, and most of the buzz surrounding Friday’s Sweet 16 showdown against Michigan has focused on his counterpart, All-American Trey Burke.

The matchup — a lightning-quick sophomore vs. a senior with scars on his knee — would seem to favor the Wolverines, and Johnson won’t try to persuade anyone who thinks Michigan will be the team to advance.

“What’s a person without an opinion?” he said. “I can’t be mad at them about an opinion. Of course I’m biased — I’ve got on a Kansas jacket — but everybody’s entitled to an opinion.”

People have opinions about Johnson, too, and usually aren’t shy about expressing them. Johnson tries to steer clear of social media, a lesson he learned from former KU point guard Tyshawn Taylor, but he’s not oblivious.

Johnson’s mother, Yolanda Brown, tries to stay away from the Internet, too. But she watched the games, and she knew better than most what her son was going through.

“Yes, it was hard,” Brown said. “It was hard to watch. I felt for him. But at the same time, I had to keep him encouraged.”

***

Marcus Johnson tried to do everything right, never wanting to look back feel like he’d sold his son short.

When Elijah was growing up, Marcus said, big-time recruiters weren’t coming to Gary, Ind. It was a notoriously dangerous city, too, with a murder rate that annually ranked among America’s worst.

Las Vegas promised opportunity, as Marcus explained to his son when they left to start a new life.

“We got out,” Marcus said, “got somewhere where there were a bunch of rich people, a bunch of people that know people and have connections. They’re going to want you to play ball, and all the dominoes are going to fall in place.”

And, actually, that’s sort of how it went. Playing at Cheyenne High in Vegas, Johnson developed a reputation as a freakish athlete and started climbing in the recruiting rankings. Big-name schools like Kansas started to call.

There was only one misstep, Marcus said, and it was one he always will regret. During Elijah’s junior year, he started coming home and complaining of a sore knee. He was still dominating on the court, though, and Marcus encouraged him to tough it out.

“That’s probably the worst parenting that I ever did in my life, with him coming to me and telling me about him hurting,” Marcus said. “I heard him, but I didn’t hear him.

“My thing was, ‘Every time I go out and see you play, you’re out here roasting everybody. I don’t see you limping or hurting or nothing.’ But then he would tell me at home, ‘Daddy, my knee is really bothering me.’ ”

Elijah ended up playing the rest of his junior year and his entire senior year of high school with a meniscus injury in his left knee, Marcus said. The first time he complained of knee pain at KU, doctors discovered the problem and quickly scheduled surgery.

“It corrects the mistake I had made earlier, because he should have been healed way before then,” Marcus said.

Marcus thought the surgery could add two inches to Elijah’s vertical jump, but for a long time, he said, it seemed to be going the other direction. And three years later, the knee was hurting again.

Johnson had just completed a strong NCAA Tournament, scoring 13.3 points per game as the Jayhawks advanced all the way to the Final Four. Marcus said he wondered if another surgery was needed after Johnson’s tournament performance, but Elijah underwent an arthroscopic procedure on his knee nonetheless.

“I was like, why are they redoing this?” Marcus said. “It’s the same thing they did his freshman year.”

When Johnson returned to Las Vegas last summer, he sat in the living room and spun a ball on his finger, under strict orders to keep his leg immobilized. Other players had warned him to follow his rehab regimen to the letter, so basketball activities were off limits for most of the summer.

When the Jayhawks started practice in the fall, coach Bill Self cautioned that Johnson wasn’t 100 percent. After a rough stretch at the CBE Classic in November, he noted that Johnson had been battling soreness and swelling.

“I just don’t think he has the explosiveness that he had last year,” Self said at the time, “in large part because his knee just got nicked up.”

Johnson downplayed the pain, and the effects are difficult to gauge. When his season started to turn, though, Self noticed him dunking more in practice. It was around that time that Johnson erupted for 39 points at Iowa State, then gave the credit to Bill Cowgill, KU’s head trainer.

“He’s been treating me, getting me right and making me feel better, giving me confidence and letting me know that, ‘You had an injury. You don’t have one now,’ ” Johnson said at the time. “Most people cater to you and baby you through it, and right now he’s just telling me, ‘Man up.’ ”

With his KU career almost finished, Johnson was asked Thursday if he’s the same player he was when he arrived, the guy with a YouTube clip of a between-the-legs, 360-degree windmill dunk.

“I haven’t been asked that in four years,” he said.

Yes, Johnson said, he’s still the same athlete, but now he plays a different role.

“When you start to play organized basketball, there’s principles you have to live to,” he said. “Some of those principles are not to run down the lane and try to get a tip dunk, because I’m the one that’s got to be back for defense.”

This evolution, whether by choice or necessity, is one of the things Johnson will take from his time at KU.

“I understand coach Self’s definition of a point guard now,” he said.

***

Elijah Johnson didn’t play in the McDonald’s All-American game.

Elijah was ranked the No. 1 point guard in the country during his junior season, Marcus said, but the family felt his ranking slipped because he stayed in Las Vegas for summer school instead of participating in a Kobe Bryant camp in Los Angeles. Marcus viewed the omission as a punishment, and it made him focus even harder on achieving the other half of his goal.

“It kind of hurt us at the time,” Marcus said, “because we only had two plans in life.”

As for the NBA, the future is uncertain. DraftExpress.com ranks Johnson No. 98 on its list of top NBA prospects, and his statistics as a senior — 9.8 points on a career-low 37-percent shooting — aren’t those of a surefire draft pick.

Sometimes you set out to accomplish one thing, though, and accomplish something else entirely. Sometimes you write the script and discover it’s already been written. Sometimes all you can do is wait for the next scene, whatever it might be.

“I think that Elijah’s going to get what he wants, and he’ll be happy,” said Brown, his mother. “At the end of the day, his life is already scripted out. We just don’t know where we’re going to end up.”